The construction and use of engine driven welders is well known. Such welders are often used when utility power grids are either not available or not reliable. In such welders, an engine and generator combination are used to generate power which is used by an output circuit to generate an output power. In an effort to improve on these systems, hybrid engine drive welders have been developed where the welder includes an energy storage device, such as a battery. The battery can be used by the welding system to add to the output power of the system and/or smooth the power provided by the generator to the output circuit—among other uses. Such systems are known and often referred to as hybrid engine drive welders. While advancements have been made for such welding systems to improve their utilization and performance, these systems still have disadvantages in that they are large and their versatility is somewhat limited in certain applications. Thus, improvements are needed to increase the versatility of hybrid engine drive welding systems.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional, traditional, and proposed approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such approaches with embodiments of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.